The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs—all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.

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Do you like the game Risk? Do you like making maps?

Hello everyone.

I myself an a fellow cartographer. I use CS3 and enjoy spending time producing digital artwork. I stumbled upon this website while looking for techniques and other cartographers methods while making my own maps for www.conquerclub.com

It is a turn based strategy online game based off of the game Risk. The cool part about this site is that there is a portion of the forum dedicated to new map production.

I understand that some of the contest/designs here are different from what I have made, but I am sure the abilities and ideas of the members here would be more that able to produce some very interesting maps.

Wow!

Nice collection of maps. Its great to see game maps for a completely different kind of game then what many RPG related maps found here.
I like how you used the planet earth as the backdrop for that Canada, Risk game board. Are all these for online "board" games?

One thing that is different that most of the maps here is the size.
Many of the maps here are over 2000x2000 pixels.

The real challenge at conquer club is that there are 2 maps sizes. Small (630x600) and large (840x800). These are needed so that virtually all monitor resolutions can see all of the map with scrolling.

Now this makes the design that much more difficult because every detail needs to be able to fit into the smallest map. Each territory has a name (so a player can determine which one they control) and each territory has to be able to display the number of armies a player has to attack or defend. This can easily bee seen by the Rail USA map I posted.

Like I said there are some rules about size which makes the development that much more difficult.

Again if anyone here joins drop me a PM and I will try to show you around if you have any questions.

WidowMakers - Really nice maps. When I was younger, a group of us would actually hand-draw alternate Risk maps, based on all sorts of things. What software do you use to create your maps?

Mostly Photoshop CS2

For the Indochina/Great Lakes/Rail USA I used Illustrator 10 then final touchups in photoshop

I also setup Circus Maximus/King of the Mountains in Maya for the perspective and shadows then adjusted the colors and textures in Photoshop.

For the Canada map I downloaded both Celestia and a NASA program called world wind. I got soem high rez images for several other sites and put those all together. I then added those to Adobe After effects so I could further wrap the textures over a sphere. Then by combining both the World Wind and AE files I made my base image to then edit in photoshop.

Have you seen the tool maptool? It's a virtual tabletop for playing RPGs online, however it can be used for boardgames with really good results. There's an example of a game of Axis and Allies posted here. It's free software and it looks like it would work really well with the great maps you have here.

That's really slick! I like the notion of laying new themes onto a classic game like Risk. Everyone already knows the rules, but new thematic elements and changing up the geography makes for a new and fresh-feeling game.

Your artwork is gorgeous, as well, though that resolution limit's gotta be frustrating at times, given the wide range of tools and capabilities you have.